While people who work in emergency management jobs are trained to respond immediately after a disaster strikes, some disasters are easier to prepare for than others, allowing these professionals to have a plan in place ahead of time. Other disasters, such as earthquakes, are completely unpredictable. Until now.
Earthquakes are one of the hardest disasters to respond to, because unlike hurricanes and floods, they cannot be predicted. However, a new warning system could alert residents that the ground will begin shaking in 10 to 15 seconds.
Although that doesn’t sound like a lot of time, it’s long enough for people to leave a hazardous environment; technology to go into safe mode or save an important document; elevators to stop at the next floor and open their doors; and trains to decelerate.
According to an article by Emergency Management, seismologists and the U.S. Geological Survey are currently working to provide California with a publicly available early warning earthquake system.
“The idea is (to) detect the beginnings of the earthquake, and then rapidly assess the magnitude that earthquake poses, and provide a warning to people before the shaking starts,” Richard Allen, seismology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “We’re talking about very short periods of time – a few seconds to a few tens of seconds.”
California isn’t the first place to develop such a system, as the Japan Meteorological Agency launched the most advanced early warning system to date during 2007. That system provides alerts through media outlets and Internet applications. Mexico City, Turkey, Taiwan and Romania also have established similar systems.
The early warning systems work by detecting primary waves, or the first tremors of an earthquake that travel about 1 to 5 mph, before the secondary waves begin causing damage. As the secondary waves move more slowly, people would have more time to take precautions following the alert.
The California project began in 2006 when the USGS provided $900,000 in funding to take the algorithms that various groups had developed for earthquake prediction and use them on real-time seismic systems. Three of those algorithms consistently detected earthquakes and predicted the two largest quakes in the state during the three-year test period.
Another two-year testing phase began in 2009 when the USGS provided $1.2 million in funding, which is being used to develop the California Integrated Seismic Network ShakeAlert System a prototype system that provides a warning to a small group of users.